Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema.
This is Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick. And today we are back with our first ever part two of a Weird House Cinema episode. We do not think we're going to make this a regular occurrence. But there is a reason we had to split last Friday's episode in two, and it's that we were talking about the nineteen eighty four David Lynch adaptation of the novel Dune, a movie that I don't think it would be possible for us to talk about for less than three hours.
In fact, if we got maximally self indulgent Robert, I think we could talk about David Lynch's doing for six hours, maybe seven. How many movie runtime lengths could we go?
I mean it depends on which which version, which cut you're going, right, But yeah, we just we had to split this one in two because there's just too much weirdness, because it is a David Lynch film, and it is based on the already weird book Dune by Frank Herbert, published in nineteen sixty five. And then we just have such a rich cast that we have to at least acknowledge these various performers who really give it their all. And then, on top of all of this, Dune Part
two just came out in cinemas. It is already a huge hit. Everyone's loving this film. Dune is in the air again. The spice is in the air again. And so we figured, well, if we're gonna cut a weird house cinema episode into two like this, this is the movie and this is the time to do it.
So I actually have rather big news with respect to Denieville news Dune Part two. We managed to see it in theaters. This is actually the first movie that Rachel and I have managed to go out to the movie theater to see since our daughter was born. And oh man, it was worth it. We had such a great time. We were just like pumping our fists during the worm
riding scenes. It was great. And I think I guess we should say at the beginning of this episode here there will be significant spoilers in this episode for the plot of Doune both. I guess I'll three the novel,
the Lynch adaptation and the new adaptation. And I thought some of the differences in the choices where it diverged from the book and from the eighty four movie were quite interesting, and I think, in some ways really smart and in other ways really taking on a challenge of portraying some of the darker and less heroic aspects that emerge toward the end of the novel that you are definitely part of Herbert's idea of what the story meant, but I think are sort of left out of David
Lynch's version, which embraces a more full spirit of adventure.
Yeah yeah, and ultimately lands on a very heroic note. We see Paul as a savior at the end of this film, and we'll get into all this, but Venus film is a different beast. While being very true to the book, I believe that the spirit of his betrayal of Paul is very much in keeping with the book and certainly in keeping with the trajectory to come.
Yeah, yeah, I think that's absolutely right. I guess we'll probably talk some more about this as we go on, But obviously, if you have not heard part one of this Weird House series, you should go back listen to part one of our talk on Dune from last Friday. First brief recap let's see, we talked about the novel
Dune and Frank Herbert. We talked about David Lynch and his sort of film career and some of the common themes and characteristics of his filmmaking, some of the story behind the making of nineteen eighty four's Dune where David Lynch. This movie is largely regarded as sort of an outlier in David Lynch's filmography, and he has to some extent
disowned it. He was very dissatisfied with the final product that was released, and he'd even said that working on this version of Doune, produced by Dino de Laurentis, sort of taught him that he would rather not make a movie at all than make a movie that he didn't have full creative control over. And he would go on to make many more movies in the wake of this where he did have creative control and are celebrated by
many as a very strange, interesting, excellent artistic achievements. Dune was not beloved by critics at the time it came out. I think in the years since critical opinion has softened somewhat. It kind of has people look back on it now and remember it fondly. But a lot of people did not like this movie at all when it came out, and I think that you can make an argument that it is in many ways a failure to adapt the novel appropriately. I think you can argue in ways also
that it is highly artistically compromised. You know, it's not what the director wanted it to be. But at the same time, I think David Lynch is done is great. I love this movie and I have a great time watching it.
Yeah, I think, especially as time has gone by, I think more and more people, I think people who have attempted to adapt it can recognize this and know more about the history of adaptation regarding this novel. But I think the more the time, the more time has passed, the more a lot of people have realized that this
was still a commendable effort. It's still it's still a pretty great telling of a Dune story, even if there are some very important thematic notes and ultimately happenings that the we'll discuss that are that I don't love, But still a lot of it. Is there a lot of the look of Doune. Is there a lot of the
feel of Dune? Is there lots of great performances, so, you know, and even throwing on the fact that he had to cut it down so much given all of these limitations, the finished product is a lot of fun. It has a lot of greatness in it. You know.
I noticed something when watching the new movie Dune Part two that made me think differently on some stuff I said in part one of the series. So last time, we talked about how difficult doing is to adapt for multiple reasons. On one hand, it's difficult because so much of the story is contextual at stuff about the setting rather than action that happens directly within the story. So it's a lot of world building that's very interesting and
sort of gives the direct plot meaning. But the other half being that a lot of the drama is internal. It's like characters internal thoughts and stuff. And we were joking about how in David Lynch's adaptation, there is often like a close up on somebody's face and they're making a thinking face while you hear their internal monologue, you know, say saying, oh, Dune racket, you know, thinking through something, uh,
And it's often funny in David Lynch's adaptation. But I realized the new movie does the same thing, and for some reason, it just it just doesn't look as funny. I don't know if the actors were instructed to make different kinds of faces, but there is zooming on people's faces and hearing their internal thoughts. Yeah.
So yeah, So we're going to continue to talk about these these differences, some of these choices as we roll
on through here. Let's see, we got into the plot a bit in the last episode, and one key thing in case you've forgotten, or if you have, you're you're gonna ignore us and you're just gonna roll into part two without listening to part one, is that the one thing we're doing different with this differently with this weird House Cinema episode is instead of rolling through the entire cast or notable members of the cast before going into the plot, we are touching in on cast members as
we go. And this was in order to try and make the split between the two episodes a little less jarny mm hmm.
So the farthest we got into the plot in part one was we talked a lot about the opening narration from Virginia Madsen, where she talks for a long time about the Spacing Guild and all that, And then we talked about the scene where the Spacing Guild arrives on the Imperial home planet and a Guild navigator in his sort of in his fish tank locomotive comes into the Emperor's throne room to consult with the Padisha Emperor Shaddam the Fourth played by Jose Ferrer, and they have a
talk about essentially the entire plot that's going to unfold in the first half of the movie, the plot against how Streides and how the Emperor is planning to use House Harkonen to destroy Duke Letto and his line.
Yeah, and then then we had to cut for time, so we're jumping back in here with more build up to the key plot. We're on a different planet. We're on a wet planet, so let let's jump right in.
Okay, So here we are at the planet Caladan. This is the home of House Atriades. It is a gray planet of rain and oceans, totally contrasted with the dryness of dune, though often comparisons are made between the waves of the sea and the dunes of the desert, and this comes up in several adaptations of the story as well. But here we get more narration. Now, last time we were joking about the amount of voiceover narration. There is to explain what's going on in this movie, and there's
even more to come. So Princess Erilan continues on the soundtrack. She says, the powerful Bennie jesser At Sisterhood for ninety generations has been manipulating bloodlines to produce the Quisat's Hatarak, a super being on Caladan. Jessica, a member of the Sisterhood and the bound concubine of Duke Letto Atredees, had been ordered to bear only daughters because of her love for the Duke. She disobeyed and gave birth to a son, Paul.
Paul atreades. Even all that exposition raises some questions, but like, I think it was part of the story that the Benny jestertz they have many powers that they train for. They have powers of mind, the mind that can sort of command matter in various ways, and one of them is that say, they can like control the sex of their offspring with their minds psychically and things like that.
But so yeah, she disobeys the rules of this powerful sisterhood and gives birth to Paul, who is yet you know, he's going to be some kind of terrible messiah.
So Paula Trds in this film is played by Kyle McLachlin born nineteen fifty nine. Kyle would have been in his early to mid twenties here, I believe, and it's awkward and it's difficult casting, but he, you know, awkwardly feels a bit too old in the first half of this movie.
I yeah, So this is not a knock on Kyle McLaughlin at all. I love Kyle McLachlin. I love his working relationship with David Lynch. He you know, they're perfect for each other in Twin Peaks and all that. And I am always happy when I see Kyle McLaughlin in a movie. He's an actor I love. But for some reason, I think I just have to admit he does not feel right in this role. Something about his approach does not fit either the great or the terrible purpose of Paul.
He doesn't seem to embrace the spirit of Epicanus really. Instead, he comes off as Kyle McLaughlin like, he's kind of nerdy and funny, and he like giggles a lot. And there have been various criticisms of Kyle's coy Maclaughlin's performance in this movie, and I have to just sort of agree with them. I want to love Kyle here, but something about him is kind of uncomfortable in the role. He has this overwhelmingly wholesome innocence and doesn't really capture
that boy with dangerous potential feeling. He's more of a cosmic Martin Prince in here.
Yeah, he never feels like a boy. He always feels like a young man or you know, a guy in his twenties anyway, And I guess the moments where I think he is best are the sort of cold moments. Sometimes it's even a moment with the internal voice going on. And in these moments it's it's almost like Paul is more of a cipher, you know, Paul kind of seen through the lens of say, the protagonist in David Clintenberg's Scanners.
You know, someone whose mental reality, whose relationship with his own thoughts and the world around him is so different from ours that he feels a little alien, you.
Know, personality.
Yeah, so there are moments like that that that worked for me. And yeah, for the most part, I don't think it's a bad performance, you know, We've seen plenty of movies where the central handsome lead is not a good actor and is not good in any of his scenes. So it's nothing like that. It's a totally different beast.
And it is very difficult and ultimately not fair to compare him in his performance to Timothy Challomy in the New Dune movies, because in my opinion, Challo May is just absolutely perfect because for one, on one hand, he is able to capture the youthfulness of Paul in part one, he really does look like a kid that is maybe fifteen, which I believe is his age in the book. And yet he is still label and I wasn't. I was
doubtful until I went into part two. He's still able to deliver that more serious awaken Paul, that dangerous Paul that we get in the second half of dv's version of Doom.
I totally agree. I think Chalomey is great in his role in the new movies, and he gets both sides of it, just like you say, he's you know, he has that youthful spirit of adventure you're so on his side in the first movie, and then that awakening to the terrible purpose, the sort of art toward tyranny and the and the coldness and abuse of power. You see that come on, uh with with such convincing intensity in the second film. And he I think he does a
really really commendable job. And I just want to say again, I'm I'm not generally knocking Cole McLaughlin. I love Kyle. I think he's great. I just think it's like he maybe didn't get something about this character.
Yeah, you know, despite the fact that you know, I remember, I think I've read in places that he was like a real student of the book, you know, and like came in and and was was you know, done his homework, and and certainly, you know, like you said, he'd go on to have a very accomplished career. He is a two time Ammy Award winner for his work on Lynch's Twin Peaks. This was his film debut, which he followed up with with Lynch's Doom follow up, The neo noir
Blue Velvet. And this is not a surprise for anyone, but because he's probably seen him in some he's a terrific comedic actor as well. Yeah, he has great comedic timing. I really enjoyed on Portlandia, for example, yes, then he played the mayor.
I think, yeah he did.
All right, Well, what's what's Paul doing. What's Paul up to this early in the film.
Well, we meet him in a room that looks kind of like the officer's cabin in a British man O war. It's this big, like stately wooden room with ornate molding and flourishes, and basically what we're going to get in this scene is yet another sizable exposition dump, serving to fill in more information about the setting, characters, and politics. So at the beginning of the scene, Paul is messing around with something that looks suspiciously like a computer. I
don't think they have computers in this world. They should have the what are the little like magnified scrolls or something.
Yeah, yeah, they better not have computers. Yes, because that's of course the whole big deal in the universe that we have the Butlerian Jahad that eradicated thinking machines, and we have this strong date, you know, religious and cultural that thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.
Right, which is why in this world they have the mentats. These are humans who are essentially trained to be computers while remaining human. Yeah, but whatever this object is he's messing with. It's displaying encyclopedic information on screen about different planets. We see information on Caladan, Benny, Tlilax, and Aracus. We learn about the mentats, the human computers with their red stained lips. We learn about how the spice milange is
mined from the surface of Dune. We learn about the worms of Iracus, which attack all rhythmic vibrations, and we learn that the Harconins are the sworn enemy of Houseitreides and their home world gide Prime is close is close to Aracus.
It is interesting that this film decides to go ahead and lay out stuff, you know, information concerning the Toley Laksu, who are not going to be important in this film at all, Like they were clearly thinking ahead to subsequent film elms. I mean, they're part of it, like their their work is present here, but you don't actually need to bring them up. Likewise, later we're gonna get a mention and you know, previously we had a mention of IX, and X is not evenally important to this film either.
So it seems like if you wanted to like cut down on the amount of information you're hitting the viewer with. These would have would have been things you could have left on the cutting room floor.
Yeah, yeah, interesting choice. We have just folded space from IX. Yes.
Uh.
Anyway, so Paul is approached in his state room here by three characters who are servants of House the Treades. There is Thufar hawat the mentat, and his eyebrows would function as arrowfoils. Essentially, he's got like gigantic wing like eyebrows, and he seems to be he's wearing like a fur fringed coat at the strange choice, but I like it. Yeah. We also meet in the scene Gerny Halleck, the Master, the war master who trains Paul in the Marshall Virtues.
And we meet doctor Wellington Ua, the physician of House A Treades. The he's a called a Suk doctor. And the Souk school of medicine is I think like the it's like the main sort of way medicine is done in the world of Doune.
All right, let's go ahead and lay out these three actors then, because they come in like next to each other, it's almost kind of comedic the way they come out, But you know, and and so, first of all, we have we have Howitt played by Freddie Jones, who lived nineteen twenty seven through twenty nineteen, British character actor who we talked about in our episode on eighty three s Kroll.
He had previously been in Lynch's The Elephant Man, and he has a slew of other credits, including nineteen sixty nine's Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, though that is generally I think one that a lot of people choose to skip in the Hammer of Frankenstein legacy. But in anyway, he's perfectly fine in this, if a bit doddering for my taste. I always picture Howitt as being a little more I don't know, he's more loof here, which is in fitting with the mintat but I tend to imagine him always
as being a bit more assertive. I mean, he's the master of Spies for House of Tredes, like.
Yeah, simultaneously serene but sharp, and I think Stephen McKinley Henderson gets that in Dune Part one absolutely yeah.
And I do love the eyebrows like this is a film that does commit to helping the viewer out by having a lot of visual cues regarding factions, houses and different types of psychically enhanced people. And so the Mintats all have just out of control eyebrows and I'll allow it.
It's gonna need okay. And he's got the red stained lips from the juice that the Mintat straight.
Yes, yes, more than that in a minute.
But okay. So that's through fear how the Mentat. But we also have Gurnie Halleck and doctor Ua.
Yeah, Hallick is of course. Gurney here is played by Patrick Stewart born in nineteen forty. You know who Patrick Stewart is. We're talking about Captain John luc Picard. We're talking about Charles Xavier. His pre track films also include nineteen eighty five It's Life Force. He was born in nineteen forty. We talked about him briefly in our episode on Nyazaki's Nausica because he did one of the voices, so one of the key voices for that and did
an excellent job. But yeah, he is our troubadour warrior in Lynch's Doom.
There's something about the way this character is realized in the movie that makes him less exciting than he could have been. Patrick Stewart in the role of Gurney Halleck. Sign me up. That sounds amazing. A lot of his scenes are kind of underwhelming, and it feels like it's not necessarily Patrick Stewart's fault. It something about the way it's that they're written and edited together. Like he's very abrupt when he starts that we're about to get into
this like sparring fight training scene. It's just like very abrupt, and he has not given a lot of room to express the character, it seems to me.
Yeah, yeah, Well, Meanwhile, in the recent Dune films, Josh Brolin has really had had more of an opportunity, I think, to inhabit this role and ultimately is just tremendous in it. So Josh Brolin easily my favorite journey that we've seen on film.
However, Patrick Stewart does serve as the human vehicle for my favorite character in this whole movie, which is Pug Atraodes. We'll get to that a little bit.
Yeah, anytime he's on camera bravely defending the atrides strategic stockpile of pugs, he's a joy, all right. And then we have yeah, we have doctor Wellington Ua played by Dean Stockwell. Who've lived nineteen thirty six through twenty twenty one, a wonderful American actor that we discussed in depth for our episode on the Dunwich Horror in which he starred as the warlock Wilburt Wetley. Definitely go back and listen to that episode if you want to hear us talk
more about Dean Stockwell. But I think he does a fine job here and makes for a very sympathetic Ua. Chan Chin is also great in the two thou twenty one adaptation.
I agree. I feel like doctor Yue is one of those characters that is hard to realize on screen because so much of his drama is internal. Like we like we were talking about that, you know, like he has sort of the the reader in the book is given access to some of his internal thoughts that give a lot of meaning to his activity, to his his sort of tragic character arc.
Yeah. Yeah, but if you're going into it cold, you really only you're still only encountering him for a short amount of time, So there's a lot of emotion and turmoil to pack into that performance in a very short time. I think both of these two gentlemen do a great
job with it. In their own way, and clearly this is something we'll touch on later, but clearly they shot more scenes with Dean Stockwell, because at times they'll just like they'll like zoom zoo, they'll like fade into a scene where he's having like a really emotional moment about what he's about to do, and then we we fade back out of that. This was a longer scene that was going to be in the intended longer cut.
Yeah, yeah, and I can imagine that being a particular sore spot if like the producers were saying, we got to cut all this doctor Ue stuff from the first third of the movie. Anyway, So these three men have all sort of been involved in training Paul to become a superhuman of sorts. He for example, when they walk into the room, he grins very pleased with himself and claims that he could tell who was approaching him from behind without looking. You know, he seems almost giddy with
how powerful his ears are, and Gurney engages. Gurney comes up and he's like, okay, time to knife fight Paul. So they're gonna have a knife sparring match. Paul is trained to fight with the blade using energy shields and at first Paul says, you know, we already did our knife training this morning. I'm not in the mood for more, and Garney Hallick says, moods a thing for cattle and love play, not fight. So that's a pretty good moment
for Patrick Stewart. But anyway, so they go into this fight, and the way the energy shields are represented in this movie kind of makes it so you can't really see the actors anymore. They're represented as these animated prisms that extend over the body from a device on the belt, and they make the characters look like sort of blocky early CGI characters like in the Money for Nothing video.
Yeah, this was disappointing for me rewatching the movie because these effects were much better in my memory. I like the concept of the shield technology being you know, kind of blocky. I like the idea of being this kind of like brownish color. The color schemes good. And interestingly enough, i'd recently watched an extra about the excellent low Ki
series mini series that came out. Well, I guess it's more than many series went two seasons, but they were inspired by these effects to create their portal doors, which are important to the plot of low Key, so clearly it resonated with other people, but yeah, rewatching it, they
just end up hiding almost all of the action. The new films do a much better job not only just effects wise, but also creating a complex shield tech on the screen that makes instant visual sense because there are a lot of ins and outs to the way they work, and it's pivotal for understanding various things about combat and the Donning universe.
Yeah, it's a difficult thing to represent, but they do a good job in the new movie. So the idea is that these personal energy shields deflect fast moving incoming objects. So if you try to stab somebody or shoot them, the shield will deflect that. So the way to harm someone with wearing one of these shields is quote the slow blade. You have to slowly move the knife through
the shield. So it's counterintuitive to normal you know, fighting instincts, and the way it's represented in the new movies is that something that comes in fast and is deflected by the shield, the shield glows blue, but when something slowly is able to move through the shield, it turns red.
Yeah, which is a great visual system for the viewer. You know, let us understand what's happening on the screen in the same way that mentats have giant eyebrows in this movie.
Right, So, after the fight, Paul and doctor Ua trade information about Irakus. Paul is extremely interested in the worms, and we also learned about the people called the Fremen who live on dune and have extreme blue eyes from their use of the spice millange. Also in this scene, Paul reveals that he suspects the Emperor is supporting the Harconins against them, again revealing a lot right at the beginning.
So not only does the Emperor explain his whole plot at the beginning of this movie, Paul says, like, I've just figured it out. I know it before it happens. So the a trainees like, no, Aracus is a trap, but they're going to go anyway, yep.
And you know that alone, that statement alone is perhaps not completely out of keeping, Like there are people in House of Tredes that realize that this is this is a trap. But key is that they think it is a trap that they can turn to their advantage.
Right. Oh, and then we get even more fight training this one. This one is a real upgrade I think from the the energy shield scene. Now we're going to get the weirding module with the stabbing robot. So they say, doctor Ua put the weirding module on him, rob How would you describe what the weirding module is and what it does.
I mean, it looks like an underwater camera housing is what it looks like. And I guess this is not in the book, but it is supposedly some sort of thing that turns your voice into a weapon. The weirding way is a movement technique martial arts that the benjesterate that is in the books. But if memory serves the filmmakers here, and I think maybe Lynch in particular wanted to avoid putting martial arts in their film. I think there's something about like Lynch didn't want to see karate
on the dunes of Iracus. Or this might also be classified as something you could consider like the fear of looking silly and cinematic adaptations of Dune, which is something you see, and at least this and the more recent adaptations, there seem to be some choices that were made where
they're like, okay, we can't do that. That might look too silly, or at least that's the way I read into some of those changes, so, you know, fair enough, but the device and the concept here are kind of clunky, and it forces us to have to figure out another strange technology after just having experienced the shields.
That's right. But the weirding module is silly. I'm so. I mean, I like it. I wouldn't want it removed from the movie. But it's funny because, as you said, it translate like sounds or voices into lethal energy attacks. So it's like a blaster that you operate by saying.
Zap, yeah, zap, zong, et cetera. You can use it, et cetera, can be a killing.
Word, that's right. I think I read somewhere that, as you said, you know, so, the Weirding module is original to Lynch's movie. It's not in the book. And I read somewhere that this might be like a strange literalization of a line in the novel about the name of maudieb the name later taken by Paul when he joins the Fremen, that name being a quote killing word, which I think may have been a metaphor in the original context, but then literalized into it. This piece of sci fi technology m.
H and so they run with it. It is it's it's weird. It's fun, but it is clunky, and it's it's not something I'm super attached too.
Yeah. So he fights the stabbing robot and Paul is shown to be very powerful at the weirding way.
Yeah.
Nice to track during this. I like it. Oh that's right, yeah with the percussion. So later we see Paul meeting other characters. He meets Duncan Idaho, who must go ahead of them to Aracus. He is the sword master of House A Treades, and I think he's going to go ahead to sort of meet with the Fremen and try to interface with them. Yeah.
Played here by Richard Jordan, who lived nineteen thirty seven through nineteen ninety three, Emmy nominated actor whose credits include seventy six is Logan's Run nineteen ninety is The Hunt for Red October in nineteen ninety three is Gettysburg. Not much really to say about him here, though, because he has almost no screen time and he's just quickly forgotten. He's an important character in the novel Dune and moving forward in the Dune series, but he's treated like a
red shirt here. At least in this cut. The twenty twenty one film with Jason Momoa in the role, is I think the best version of the character we've seen so far in an adaptation. And we'll just see where it goes from there in the future. Ah.
Yeah, I didn't put it together yet. We may get a Jason Momoa.
Gola a mamola if you will.
So we also meet here Duke Leto, the head of house Atredes, who meets with his son Paul, and we learned Duke Letto is very proud of his son. Duke Leto is shown to be, within the context of the story, a very a very kind, fair and you know, stern, but just kind of ruler. And he, you know, he encourages his son Paul and tells him he's proud of him. He says, without change, something sleeps inside us and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.
Yeah, this is a great bit, recurring bit in this film.
I like it.
The Duke here is played by German actor Jurgen Procnow born nineteen forty one. His big breakout role was, of course, playing the captain in nineteen eighty one's The Boat or Doss Boat or doss Boot if you will see previous discussions on the title for this film. But actor with a tremendous face and a great presence for playing stern, serious, distant,
and sometimes threatening characters. His filmography is all over the place, but a few notable points include Michael Mann's The Keep from eighty three, Twin Peaks Firewalk with Me in ninety two, kind of continuing this trend of Lynch often bringing back actors that he worked with on Doune for other projects. He of course plays the author Sutter Kane and John
Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness. He has a role in the Judge Dread film from ninety five, and he pops up in The English Patient in ninety six, but lots of other credits. I think he even plays an older Arnold Schwarzenegger in a TV bio movie about Arnold Schwarzenegger.
What.
Yeah, it was like an A A and E movie or something. I remember it looked did not look.
Good, like a movie about an existing actor projecting that ac actor into the future.
Yeah, I don't know, but at any rate, you know, it ends up being a more distant feeling duke here, And I think I think it works, you know, concerning his relationship with Paul, and there are these moments of warmth like the Sleeper Awaken speech. But I would say he's my third favorite Duke Leedo, the first behind Oscar Isaac and William Hurt.
I also really like Oscar Isaac's performance in the new film. So so yeah, that's Paul's father. We also meet Paul's mother, Lady Jessica, whom we meet walking through the rain in the courtyard of the palace, hidden under this voluminous hood. And she seems very interesting and mysterious when we first meet her, because we hear her inner voice worrying about Paul and saying that he must face the box. No man has ever faced it before, and tonight she may
lose her son. So when we meet her, she's already worrying that she may have committed her son to a lethal challenge.
Yeah, and she was played here by Francesca and Niece born nineteen forty five, English actor who also played the Witch of the Web in nineteen eighty three Skroll. So another Kroll connection. Extensive stage, screen and TV credits. She played Lady Macbeth in that excellent nineteen seventy two film adaptation.
I like her in this role, and she plays it with this interesting mix of deference and defiance. These two elements come out in different moments. She's like a character pulled back and forth between duty to authority and following her own heart and her love for her family. And so I really like her in this role. I feel like she kind of gets her character gets downplayed in the second half of the story here in the eighty
four adaptation, and I like more. I think what is done with Rebecca Ferguson's role in the newer adaptations?
Agreed, Yeah, I think Rebecca Ferguson just gets more to do with the character. We get a strong portrayal of Lady Jessica both before and after the initial fall of House Atreades.
Oh, but all of this is leading up to the return of a character we've already met. We talked about in the last episode, the Reverend Mother gaias Helen Moheim, and we met her with the Emperor because she is
the Emperor's truth sayer. You know, she was supposed to try to listen in on the meeting between the Emperor and the Guild Navigator, and as she learns from that meeting that there is some significance to Paula Trades, the young heir of House Atreades, and that she and the Benny Jester at Sisters must learn more about Paul to find out what his significance is. So here she is yeah.
So, and this is where we get our goamja bar scene, which is I think pretty effective here. I like it in both this adaptation and the recent adaptation. You know, it's one of the most famous scenes in the whole novel, and it's also one of the first big scene in the novel. As I think we've discussed before, Like it happens almost immediately in your reading of.
The book, that's right. So the premise of the scene is that the Reverend Mother arrives, she speaks with Lady Jessica, and Paul sort of awakes and overhears them speaking a little bit about something about his purpose and that he must be tested. So Paul is woken in the night and taken before the Reverend Mother. We do get some chewing out of Lady Jessica by the Reverend Mother because of her hubris, disobeying orders and having a son trying you know, she's like you're trying to create the queens
Out's hatterak. You're not supposed to do that. That is the super being of the universe. That's violation of orders. So forth. Now, somewhere before we actually get the hand in the Box, there's a moment here where we see Duke Leto alone in his office, apparently maybe aware of what's going on, but not intervening. I don't recall if in the book he was aware or not, but anyway, we see him sitting alone in his office. And this is the first time we see the House of Trade pug.
Can we set off a pug alarm pug alert sidebar on the pug, So we're gonna see this pug pop up a number of times, like when they arrive on the planet, they've got the pug with them. And then also later when the Harconins attack the House of Tredes, we see Gurnie Halleck Patrick Stewart running into battle with like this science fiction rifle, clutching the pug to his chest. I have always loved this detail. It seems so characteristically Lynchian.
The warriors of this feudal house have toy breed dogs that they carry around with them from planet to planet, even taking them into battle as if they are tokens of good fortune or provide magical protection. There is. It's like a lot of images in David Lynch movies, and I think part of what makes him a really great filmmaker and artist is he puts in these weird images that on one hand feel kind of off, but on the other hand you think about them and they just
feel right. Something about the pug works. I don't know what it means, but it feels like, yeah, they would have a pug like this.
Yeah, well, we saw the Emperor had his own dog breeds running around, so it's weird, but it feels it's also kind of fitting that a great house would have its signature dog breed. The pug is also the closest thing that we get to a chair dog, which we get much later in the book series.
I think the pug is not mistreated. We see the pug treated very lovingly and respectfully.
Well, cheer dogs are not mistreated either. They just do they have a function you sit on them, and that you're not mistreating a chair dog to sit on a chair dog.
Surely, Oh okay, I misunderstood the.
Cheer dog doesn't have a face or presumably a butt. I guess it's I don't know. There's probably some inherent cruelty in the creation of a chair dog, but it's never really explored.
Not to get too dark. I guess you could say some cruelty in the creation of a pug as well, but that's they don't have to go. But these, these pugs are treated. These are beloved pugs. The atrendees love their pugs.
Pugs are cuties, no doubt about it. We have made a dog in the semblance of a human baby.
We were told we shall not, but you just can't follow those rules. Okay, so sorry. We coming back to the Gomjabar scene. So this is where the reverend Mother confronts Paul alone in the study in the house on Kaladan here and she starts to command him using the voice. This is one of the many Beni Jesert arts having a way of manipulating their voice so as to sort of hypnotize and command people, even against their will. The Reverend Mother tries to use the voice to command Paul,
but he's somewhat resistant at first. When she talks. In this movie, it's kind of a lizard queen speaking through a fan voice.
Yeah, it sounds it sounds really good in my opinion. Also really like the way that it's brought to life in the new film adaptations, and they feel similar. They're probably not that similar if you line them up one to one, but they're both effective for me.
Yeah, I agree. So Paul is given this trial, the trial of the Box where the reverend. So he puts his hand in a box that the reverend mother offers him, and then she puts a sort of poisoned thimble with a needle on it against his neck and tells him there's going to be pain in the box. He will want to remove his hand, but if he removes his hand, she will stab him with the gum jabbar the poison needle,
and he will die. He's suffering, it's burning, the fire is consuming the flesh down to the bone, he thinks, or at least it feels that way. And the whole point is that someone of inferior will would remove their hand from the box in response to the pain. But there's something she's testing for kind of will in Paul to face the pain and keep his hand inside. And in this scene when trying to get through the pain. We hear Paul's inner voice reciting the Litany against Fear.
One of the great things from the novel and the version of it used in the movie, is that he says, I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone, there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
And I really like his reading of this with the inner voice. It's kind of there's an urgency to it because he is in pain. I heard the sample in a mix once before. I believe it was an Autecher mix. It was fay well, very well utilized.
I think there are slight changes to the Litany against Fear here from in the book. I don't remember what the changes are, but I like this version of it.
Yeah, yeah, it's still very much. It keeps most of the words and definitely keeps the spirit of the thing.
And colwahad, He's okay, he passed the test. The reverend mother says coolwahad, which is a phrase meaning I am profoundly stirred, and she explains the prophecy of the quisats Haderak to Paul, but Paul fears for his father, and the reverend mother tells him what can be done to protect his father has been done, So you know, it's there's a kind of fatalism going on here.
Yeah, all right, it's time to planet hop again.
Oh boy, and now we're getting really depraved. So let's go to Gidee Prime, home of House Harconin and lured. The way the Harconins are realized in this movie, there is a level of weirdness that again goes beyond the books, is purely David Lynch, I think, so. First of all,
I just wanted to focus. They give us a brief look at the exterior of Gidee Prime before we meet the characters, and it appears to be a kind of urban landscape of shadows and green light, with these unbroken walls of industrial looking buildings stretching up until they vanish
into a dark sky. There's black smoke pouring out of a hidden orifice in the city walls, towers of metal struts in the foreground, almost like watchtowers or guard stations, with some kind of tortured sculpture looming between the buildings. And we see the sculpture many times. It is like a giant porcelain face on which the eyes and nose are hidden behind a shadow, and all that's visible is a giant gaping mouth over a plump chin, almost like the mouth of a fish, but on the head of
a human baby. So is this sculpture opening its mouth to devour food, to scream in pain, or to gasp for breath? All seem to be implied this design for the home world of the Harconins, because it's like this little sculpture with the eyes hidden, is like greed, pain, fear, and desperation luxuriating in the ambiguity between them all.
And is it also piping out smoke or some sort of vapor because the planet itself is supposed to be heavily polluted. So yes, I kind of like see it as that as well, like everything you said, but on top of that, it's spouting pollution.
There you see smoke coming out. I interpreted as the smoke coming out from behind the sculpture, but I don't know. It could be it could be, but yeah, the planet has a very I think a lot with the green designs is to suggest not a natural green like plants, but like a poisonous green, a kind of industrial green ooze.
Absolutely, yeah, I love this look. We only see like really a glimpse of it here, but it's reminiscent of hr Giger's original biomechanical designs for the planet from I believe the Jodroowski adaptation that never came to fruition, but little bits like that has kind of been passed down and become part of the tradition of portraying Dune on film,
even in the recent DV adaptation. So we see a lot more of this planet in part two, of course, and they have their own wonderful and an inventive way of envisioning it, but there is still that biomechanical gothic aspect to everything.
Yeah. Yeah, Well in the new movie, I love that they do it as a very desaturated or I don't know if that's the right term. Actually it's a black and white kind of environment with high contrast that I think is explained by Gideye Prime having a black son so they say there's no color on the surface of the planet.
Yeah, yeah, I think that's supposed to be the reason for it, and give him an excuse to shoot it an infra red apparently.
So we meet here the Harkonen Mintat Piterer Devrees, who is the you know, the court, the equivalent of Thufir Hawat to house the Treades. This is played by.
Oh well, this of course is Brad Dorif born nineteen fifty. Yes, one of American cinema's finest weird actors. We've talked about it on the show before, in our episode on Toby Hooper's Spontaneous Combustion from nineteen eighty nine. And he's one of these actors that's enjoyable in pretty much anything, regardless
of overall film quality. You know, he's probably best known for his performances in such films as nineteen seventy nine's Wise Blood, which is generally excellent, nineteen eighty eight Child's Play in two thousand and two's Lord of the Rings the Two Towers.
In which he plays Grima worm tongue.
Yeah, he had great performance there in which he has no eyebrows. But in this in Lynch's Doom, he of course has Mintat eyebrows, and I do love him in this. He captures the viciousness of Pider, But at the same time, this is a Dune character that I dearly love, and there's never enough time in any adaptation to explore him and his delicious, dangerous relationship with the baron, where they both expect to know that the other will try and
kill them at one point the other. It's like a delicate balance.
Yeah, he is an evil, vicious character, but also for some reason I find him pitiable.
Yeah, yeah, I mean he is a twisted mentat. He is the product of some sort of either bizarre corruption of a normal mentat or some corruption of the mentat process. And with all these things you have to sort of pick and choose how are you going to present him. I do quite love David Datzmachian's performance in the recent adaptation as well, but it's just a different slice of the same character. He's more cerebral and withdrawn in that performance,
and it still works. It still captures a part of what is a ultimately a brief but complex character.
Right. So, Pider, he's speaking to himself. He says, it is by will alone, I set my mind in motion. So he's reciting a kind of Mintat litany here, some sort of equivalent to the Litany against Fear, except instead of about avoiding fear, this is about, like, you know, realizing your potential with the help of drugs. Because it goes on to say it is by the juice of Sappho that thoughts acquire speed, that lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning, and then he says that a bunch of times.
Yeah, this mintat Mantra is not from the books, but it is. It's one of those additions that feels perfectly at home in the Dune universe. It works, It absolutely works. And the whole thing about the juice of the Sappho is very much in the text.
Yeah, he's so this is a nervous and unhappy Mintat in a dangerous situation.
Yeah, nervous, angry, scheming, all those things, and yeah, we get it in this performance.
So there are more visions of Giddee Prime people in pure white clothing walking through industrial mazes illuminated by green light. It's a very striking vision. Again, I love the designs of the planet here. I think they really work. We see harconin soldiers standing lined up with multiple barreled firearms
in hand. Then finally we go to meet the Harconein Royalty in a room that is almost like it's green, like a bar of soap, and the Harconins are being attended by servants with almost Clive Barker style body modifications. Ears clipped and sown folded in on themselves, eyelids sewn shut with threads and tacks driven into the eyes. Also, everybody that has hair has red hair.
Yeah, and the red hair touch is nice and helps us identify Harconins. But already this scene is too much like the eyes and ears sewn up is is just too much. And also that green, that green is too much like a modern perspective. I'll occasionally see stills from this and I'll initially think, oh, this is an unfinished sequence. That's green screen, you know, like that's where my mind goes, like, that's how alarming that green color is.
So we finally meet the patriarch of the villainous house Harconin. Here, the Baron Vladimir Harconin being attended by doctors. So when we first see him, his face is covered in boils of some kind, and the doctors are doing something grotesque with them with a needle.
Yeah. Now, this Baron Vladimir Harconin is played by Kenneth McMillan, who lived nineteen thirty two through nineteen eighty nine. American character actor who often played heavies and a reminder that by heavies I mean like threatening or dominant antagonists. He
also played a lot of gruff authority figures. He didn't apparently didn't pursue an acting career until he was in his thirties, and he was forty before his first screen TV credits appear, showing up in a couple episodes of Dark Shadows, as well as an uncredited role in nineteen seventy three Serpico. He followed this up with small roles in the Taking of Pelham one, two three, The Stepford Wives, and Dog Day Afternoon. A fair amount of TV followed,
including a role on the series Rota. He played a cop in the nineteen seventy nine Salem's Lot mini series from Toby Hooper, and he'd follow up Doune with a role in nineteen eighty five's Runaway Train and then mostly TV work.
So this version of Baron Harkonen likes to scream and fly around in the air while screaming.
Yeah. This character, this characterization of the Baron is a lot in the text. We are privy to his inner thoughts, and there are various dimensions to the character of the Baron, all of them evil. He is a man of vast greed and ambition, of appetite, brutality, fear, and endless plotting, and you can't possibly capture all of that on screen, so you pick and choose what you can. The recent adaptations do a great job focusing mostly on the brutal
plotting aspect of the character. While this version of the Baron is a wild, gross demon of consumption, cackling, floating around, spitting, oozing and so forth. It's just too much, But to McMillan's credit, he rolls with it and delivers some nice menace. I'd say ultimately he's my third favorite Baron behind stellin Scars Guard. In the more recent adaptations, who's more of
like the threatening and cerebral Baron? And then I have to say that Ian McNeice did a great job with it in the mini series, the sci fi mini series as well.
Yeah, this is a less serious portrayal of the Baron than we get like with the Scar's Guard. Obviously, that is a very deep, dark, scary baron. This Baron is a lot funnier and that kind of continues with how the rest of how Harkonin is portrayed. We meet the baron's to nephew is a Fadea, and the Beast Rabon. I think they're called the Beast by the people of Irakus Rabon. What's his first name, Glossu or something, I believe.
So, yeah, So the Beast here is played by Paul L. Smith of nineteen thirty six through twenty twelve, So this is another over the top performance just by another noted gruff character actor. So he's an American actor who played Bluto in the nineteen eighty Pope Eye movie. Other credits include Sam Raimi's Cohen Brothers scripted film Crime Way from eighty five, Red Sonia from eighty five, Gore from eighty seven, and the nineteen eighty two Spanish horror movie Pieces, which
is on our potential to do list. But yeah, basically, this Beast is just a grotesque cartoon character. Dave Bautista does a solid job as the character in the recent films, and they really expand the role to make the role more meaningful and give Bautista much more to do.
Like we were saying with Pider earlier, this is another character who is totally completely evil but also ends up being rather pitiable in the story.
Yeah, and now the other son is, of course the golden child of House Harkonen. This is fate rap though, like you said, played by Sting, Yeah, fifty one. I believe this was only his fourth acting role, following nineteen eighty two's Brimstone and Treckle. And he'd follow this up by playing Frankenstein in nineteen eighty five's The Bride. That's the Doctor, by the way, that the true Frankenstein, not
Frankenstein as a shorthand for the Monster. He's continued to act on and off over the years, often you know, really good, especially in small doses here and there. He is an Oscar winner. But in the original song category.
Mm okay, I'm trying to think of what other movies is he He was in that. He was in the Who's Other Rock Opera? Not Tommy but Quadrophenia.
He was, Yeah, he was. I think he had a small role in Lockstock and two smoking barrels much later, and like that was one where it's a very small role, but he's really good in it.
You know, what do I think of Sting's performance in this movie? You know, it's absolutely memorable. I'm never gonna not be thinking about him in this role, especially his line delivery during the final fight scene, We'll get too later with you. I will kill him, I will kill you.
Yeah, it's a it's a lot to figure out because he is he is over the top, and it's weird. It's a weird performance. He looks amazing and Fade Rotha on top of that is a strange character, like and no film adaptation, in my opinion, has really done him complete justice. Like he we don't know a lot about him ultimately, but we know and we know enough about him in the book that he's he's brash, he's not
the plotter in the planner that his uncle is. His uncle is doing a lot to try and ensure that he moves up in the world and becomes the new face of House Harkonen. But there seems to be a lot of frustration with his maturity level and his appreciation for all of this. And you know, we just we tend to see less of that in the film adaptations.
Yeah, the new movie does a good job of setting him up as a foil to Paul, that there are sort of two sides of the same coin. Yeah.
Yeah, Austin Butler does a great job in doing Part two as this character, but it's a it's a rather different read on him. Like, on one hand, he's still supposed to be a kind of hot and supposed to be a definite threat to Paul, though perplexingly the new adaptations portray him as an honorable fighter, which I'm still
trying to figure that out. I need to view Part two again in order to figure out how I really feel about all this, because I think one of the appeals of the character in the book and in this adaptation is that he will absolutely cheat to win, Yes, And I feel like that helped that that actually makes him more of a threat to Paul, because this is a guy will that will win at any cost and is used to winning at any cost and feels no shame about it.
Yeah. Originally, the Harconins are not like worthy opponents or you know, honorable honorable villains. They are They're absolute like liars and cheaters and dirty tricksters and they'll do whatever they can.
Yeah, So I'm sure dv has has his reasons, And like I say, I need to watch Doing Part two again to sort of figure out exactly how I feel about that performance. Now.
I do love the book, but I think there is a new There's a change made in the new movie that I appreciate, which is that it excises from the Harconin plot line and characterization some elements that I think you could fairly argue are homophobic in the original portrayal, where like these like the Harconin characters, especially the Baron, are portrayed as having same sec attraction and I think you can you can say fairly it is not incidental to the fact that they're villains, but more sort of
portrayed as part of their deviousness.
Yeah. I think that was a solid cut for for the the new adaptations for sure. And and it's it's something that is handled in this adaptation, in Lynch's adaptation in a way that has that has attracted a fair amount of criticism over the years.
Yeah, from what I can tell, it seems more implicit in Lynch's movie and a little more explicit in the book. But still I think it's somewhat there in the movie.
Yeah, but let's not detract from the utter weirdness of this absolute Lynchian circus of a scene.
Yes, because the setting. We haven't even finished describing the room they're in that. Oh no, okay, So interesting things about this scene. There is boiling acid under the floor, and it just seems to be part of the culture of Gidee Prime that when you're done with things, like the way we might throw something in the garbage can, they can throw things through a hole in the floor
grate into the boiling acid below. So they use the boiling acid as the dumpster, and it's just there underneath the floor at all times, and I guess they're presumably breathing the fumes from it constantly.
It's world building, baby.
I like the detail. It's good. I don't recall if there's anything like that in the book, but it makes sense in this movie. The doctors attending the baron also have a very David lynch quality to them. This seems like purely Lynchy and flourish. One of them is like saying a little sort of nursery rhyme to the boils as he is picking at them, so he says, like, put the pick in their peete, turn it round real neat.
That kind of cutesy rhyming in this grotesque context is an extremely David Lynch kind of thing to do.
Yeah, I'll just mention briefly that that's the Leonardo Chimino playing the Baron's Doctor livednineteen seventeen through twenty twelve. You probably saw him in water World or in nineteen eighty seven's The Monster Squad when he played where he plays the old German guy. But yeah, this is weird and not in the books and just just strange, just strange and grotesque.
Speaking of strange and grotesque, what is the thing that Rabond like crushes and then drinks the juice of here? Is this in some way a spice based cocktail? I don't think, as far as I know, Rabond is not consuming spice, because do we see him with blue eyes at all? He crushes something in a glass box and then sucks up its juice.
I don't think this is spice though. To be sure, in the book they mentioned that you know a lot of royal houses use spice because spice extends your human life, And so I mean it's maybe they're using spice and they just don't use it at the levels that frem and use it to gain their eyes.
This, I don't know.
I always kind of read this as some other kind of strange space drug in this universe of weird space drugs. It's like a mummified frog juice box. It's like you auto crush a petrified creature and then you inhale it, and then you, of course you chunk the juice box across the room. I'm not sure what this is all about. I don't think it's anything from the book or the books, but it is marvelously strange. I like it.
So anyway, you know, they're talking about their plots against House of Treades and the Baron. Just a note, generally he often starts levitating up in the air when he gets really excited. Again, the difference I think from the book that like in the book they say the Baron has like suspensers that help him like stay aloft, like help him stand up or something like that. But this is he's just flying all the time here.
Yeah. Yeah, this movie made the choice that he was going to fly around and float around, and all subsequent adaptations have gone on that route as well, though it's more comical in this version, and it's more threatening and ominous in dv's adaptations. But we're still not out of all the weird creations and recreations for this scene.
Oh no, there's also like, oh, this grotesque thing where like many of the servants and people like the people who work for the atreadees or not the Atredees. Sorry, the Harconans have this like plug, this like a valve in their heart that the Harconans can just like pull out the plug and like all their blood runs out of their chest and they die. And it seems that the baron just sometimes removes people's plugs for fun.
Yeah, this is not in the books, but it is. It is kind of a fitting invention for the hearkens on a hole because yeah, so the baron apparently likes to level the playing field with his servants in his underling so that he can kill them at will by simply pulling this thing out. But this sequence in particular that follows because basically a what I think he's credited as a flower boy, like a servant comes in and the baron approaches him rather lustily and then pulls out
his heart plug and blood goes everywhere. And this sequence has generated for amount criticism over the years due to not only its grotesque qualities, but also questionable implications during the AIDS crisis of the nineteen eighties. Given that in Quick Secession we see same sex desire, physical illness on the part of the baron, and also blood spraying everywhere. I don't think any of that was actually intentional, and Lynch is drawing directly on elements from the book here
in many cases. But there's longstanding social criticism of this sequence.
Yeah, I can see, maybe an isolation, some of these weird elements working better individually, but put together like this, I can absolutely see what the critics are saying there. And again, I think it was a good choice in the newer movies to remove the same sex attraction element from the Harconins because it's just not really necessary and it avoids this kind of implication, the implication that like that in itself is part of their deviousness or is evil in some way. Okay, so I think we're done
with Gidee Prime for now, right, Could we onto Aracus? No? No, no, no, not onto Aracus. We're gonna go back to Caladan first. Okay, So we see, you know, the the Atredes leaving the planet with their pug, Jessica, Letto and Paul. So they get on board the spaceship and blast off for Dune, and the spaceships we see them approaching the Guild Highliner, which is like an object that's sort of like a city sized baton floating in the void. And these are
the ships that can travel through folded space. So you take a spaceship up to the Guild Highliner, I think, you get on board it, and then it takes you between the different stars in the galaxy. And so their ship enters the Guild Highliner through a huge opening framed by ornate gold decorations, like the frame of a Renaissance painting. I like that detail, and I really like this sequence because here space travel is true. We did with apprehension
and reverence as a mystical, almost magical event. It's so far from the kind of casual jet fighter pilots in space themes that we would get in so many other sci fi movies of the time. I love the feeling created here that to travel on a Guild Highliner is to participate in a profound and unsettling mystery.
Yeah, absolutely, and one that is managed by a reclusive cult that has a complete monopoly on space travel. A reminder that no one is moving star to star in the Doom universe except for the Guild. So there are no space battles because there's nobody to engage in those space battles. The Guild controls everything.
Yeah, that's a really good point. But so I think this is something that the Lynch movie does especially well, is create this sense of awe and mystery and intrepidation and danger about interstellar travel. Yeah, you're at the mercy of this, this reclusive cult, as you said.
All right, so we board up the high liner and then we set off onward to Aracus.
That's right. Finally we're at Doune, So the planet appears as a reverse setting sun and they go down to the surface. Jessica, Letto and Paul arrive and set foot on the planet, and then Princess Irelon resumes the narration. Got to get more more voiceover narration. She says that House of Trades took control of Iracas sixty three standard days into the year ten thousand and one, ninety one, it was known that the Harconins, the former rulers of Aracus,
would leave many suicide troops behind. A trade's patrols were doubled, and we learn in the following scenes that the Harconans have sabotaged machinery and defenses on the planet. We of course meet Duncan Idaho yet again. He comes to Duke Letto. He's dressed in a still suit. This is the first glimpse we get. I think of what the still suit looks like here, which it looks just kind of like a padded full body suit, but it's got the hose
that connects to the nose. This is the local freemen attire, which allows one to survive in the desert without losing water. It recycles your sweat, the vapor in your breath, your urine, your feces, everything, All the water comes back.
Yeah. Yeah, and the suits look pretty darn good in this film. In fact, I know people who prefer these suits to the new adaptations. But I like him in both.
Yeah, I do too. So Duncan reports to the Duke that he's made contact with the Fremen and they could be powerful allies, especially since he believes there are many, many more of them than the Emperor realizes. They exist in vast numbers hidden from the Imperial census. So that's kind of threatening. So we watch the atreadees troops being trained to preserve water, and we meet a new character.
We meet Leat Kines, the Judge of Change, which means he's supposed to oversee the change between the Harconean control of Iracus to a Trade's control of Iracus and then report to the lands Rad which is like the Parliament of this universe, and like make sure that everything has been done fairly. But he's also an ecologist. He's an imperial ecologist, and he's been on the planet a long time. I might have even been born here. He's sort of adapted to Fremen ways and he has blue eyes from the Spice.
Yeah, And this is of course Max Foncito playing in the role I lived in nineteen twenty nine through twenty twenty. See our recent episode on Flash Gordon for a longer discussion on Max here. But he is as always a fine presence in a film, but he is barely in this. This character's presence is much reduced. We see a lot more of kinds in the recent films, played by Sharon Duncan Brewster, who is also great.
Yes she is. I wonder why they use so little of doctor Kynes in this movie. Makes you wonder if stuff got cut.
Oh yeah, I get the feeling. It's just like the economy of the cut here. And you know I should throw in I probably mentioned this in the last episode. There are those longer unauthorized cuts of nineteen eighty four's Dune that Lynch totally disowns. Those are like, you know, Smithy directed productions, and I really haven't seen those in full. So maybe we can have some listeners ride in with their thoughts on deleted scenes that pop up again in
that longer cut. But certainly, in this the only official cut of David Lynch's Dune, this character is barely present.
He is present long enough to observe that Paul wears a still suit as if he was born to it, because the you know, the treadees are putting on still suits to go out and survey spice production. Paul is wearing his like a pro so that's part of a prophecy. Actually, oh, how do you even? This is actually a good point to discuss the way that I think the Lynch movie.
One way it sort of fails is it it plays up a lot about the Spacing Guild that is not really in the original Doune novel, But it really under sells the role of the Beni Jessert, I think, and like their whole plot to like establish, like seed these prophecies throughout the cultures of the galaxy that would later connect to the figure that they're going to use to
attain power, the Quisat's Hatterak. And so they put all of these prophecies out among the people, and Paul arrives on this planet and is immediately observed by people who are familiar with these prophecies to fulfill them.
Yeah. Yeah, like the ground has been prepared for one such as he, and that's it's an important factor. Yeah, that is just not as present in this adaptation.
And that's something again I really appreciate about the new movies is they sort of downplay the role of the Spacing Guild and play no I mean, I don't know, the Spacing Guild is cool too, so it's not like I don't want to see them, but they focus more on the plots and politics of the Beni Jesert, which I think is a smart move. Ye anyway, and this is the scene where Letto, Paul and Kines go out in a flying machine to observe spice harvesters at work.
They're seeing, you know, the machines out in the desert getting the spice from the sand. But uh oh, there is worm sign. This apparently is a common thing about how spice production takes place. The harvesters will work up until the last minute when a worm is about to arrive and eat them, and then they will be lifted away by a flying vehicle called a carry all and
taken to safety. But uh oh, they're observing here that a spice harvester is working, a worm is on the way, and the carry all that is supposed to rescue it has been sabotaged. So Duke Leto leads a rescue of the men working. The spice harvester is leaving the spice behind, rescuing the workers and bringing them onto his ornithopter. And then we see a worm eat the harvester as they take off, and we hear Kine's inner voice saying, oh, I like this, Duke. He left the spice behind and saved the men.
I talked a lot about ornithopters in Wednesday's short form episode, but briefly, I'll just say, yeah, the ornithopters in the recent adaptations are amazing. They're like apache helicopters combined with a dragonfly in a way that it's like terrifying and majestic on the screen. In this adaptation, especially the Atreades ornithopter is like a big metal berb, you know. It's it's clunky, it's chonky. It's got these little wings that
seem decorative and not functional. The Harconin ornithopters, which I don't even know if we really get to see them all that much, but the design for those is a lot more interesting, but also still doesn't fully embrace the whole flapping of wings.
Yeah. Okay, so we're getting into the plots here against House a Treadees. So first of all, Lady Jessica determines that doctor Yua has a secret concerning his wife and his hatred of the Harconans, but that is not fully fleshed out yet. We get to meet the housekeeper on Erken here, the capital of Iracus. This is shout out mapes. Paul tries spice for the first time, and he has
visions the second moon the sleeper must awaken. And we also get the hunter Seeker attack on Paul, which is something that's realized in both movie adaptations, where there's like this little needlelike mosquito type creature that's trying to assassinate Paul and he manages to avoid it.
Yeah, great sequence in both films and mapes. By the way, is played by Linda hunt Boord nineteen forty five Academy Award winning actor. She played Billy Kwan in the Year Living Dangerously from eighty two, so I have to single her out.
Yeah. So, but here we're getting to the Harconin attack. The double Cross is in motion now, so there has we've we've received word that there was a trader among house the trades, and we finally learn it is doctor Yua here uh and there are reasons so uh. Doctor Ua ambushes Duke Letto in the night with a with a drugged dart that kind of paralyzes him, and then
doctor Ua explains his plot. He has sabotaged the shields of the city, destroyed the weirding modules, and the Harconin troops are on the way, but He's like, Okay, it's not over, Duke Leto, you can still kill Baron Harconin, and he gives Leto the poison gas tooth. He tells him, when you see the baron, remember the tooth. And this is a great plot point.
Yeah, the tooth stain is of course fittingly grosser in this adaptation, like even when uas like getting it out of its box to implant it, like it just like this is gonna hurt. This is gonna be a little gross.
The idea is he'll bite down on it when the baron leans over him, and that will that'll spit the poison gas in the Baron's face and kill him. And we learn, of course doctor Yue is not doing this out of maliciousness toward House Atredees, but he wants revenge against the baron because the Harconans have for many years captured his wife and have probably murdered her.
But he has to know for sure, and this is how he's going to get to know for sure. But he's also going to plot the destruction of the architect of his wife's probable death right.
So the attack begins. The Harconin troops here look so creepy. They look like welders with these black full hood masks with a little green square window in the front, and so that looks really creepy. However, the actual violence in this battle scene is not very cool. It is mostly i think, unintentionally funny.
Yeah, it's a little hockey.
Baron Harconin leaves Paul and Jessica with Pyder Devrees with instructions to kill them. They are sent off to the desert to be left there to be eaten by worms so there will be no evidence this was doctor Yuay's idea. But actually it turns out Doctor Yua has been trying to protect them. He has packed still suits for them, and Paul and Jessica use the Beni Jesert voice to command the Harconean troops and escape into the desert. Meanwhile, Duke Letto's tooth strike against the Baron is about to
unfold the Barons. They're gloating over him, but it fails to get the baron. Instead, it kills Pyder DeVries, it kills the house harcone in Mintat played by Brad Duraf, and the baron we get his reaction where he's like, I'm alive. I'm alive, floating in the air, screaming so inspiring.
The poison tooth sequence, at least when they have when they refer back to it visually, it is, as you might expect, far more grotesque in this adaptation, because we see that it's like an explosion of gas stick gas has gone off in the Duke's mouth and is like eaten through his cheek. Even so, it's it's grim stuff. No.
I know, we've been dwelling on a lot of detail in the plot, so I think maybe we should shift into moving a little more quickly through the movie. And this is a good place to do it, because this is also where the movie starts moving much more quickly through the plot. And this, I think is a is a fair major criticism of the eighty four Dune is that somewhere around right here things start happening way too fast.
Yeah, it becomes fragmentary and kind of feels like Doune the scrap Book leading up to like the final confrontation.
Yes, yes, okay, So Paul and Jessica escape into the desert. They go to the forbidden South Polar regions. They're trying to avoid being eaten by a worm. And this is where Paul really like he gets he gets deep spice, exposure to spice. In the desert, he sees the second moon, you know. He hears the voice saying the sleeper must awaken. He sees a hand reaching from space. He knows the and the Guild want him destroyed, and finally he hears that they will call him wad Deep. So that's a
premonition of everything to come. And he realizes that the spice is in everything on the planet, and the spice is changing him. It's causing him to reach his potential as the chosen One, and he knows the future and his own terrible destiny. Also revealed here is that Jessica, Lady Jessica, is pregnant with Paul's sister, who is also faded for greatness in some way. And there's adventure in the desert as Paul and Jessica travel across the sand
trying to avoid worms. They have to, of course, do the Fremen walk to walk without rhythm on the sand, and here we do see the worm in its full glory while it's chasing them. We see its trifled maw leaping out from the sand and its design is almost like a flower with petals opening around this toothy mouth. I really do like the design of the worms in this movie. I think they look great. They're scary and menacing.
Some of the worm riding scenes, however, are quite funny and don't really have the same grandeur as when you're just seeing the worm in its opening mouth. Also, somewhere in the sequence we first see the use I think of the thumper, a very important technology in this movie.
Thumpers are huge in this movie, and it works. Like you'll often see on the poster, there's Paul Addredes with something slung across his back in the desert. That's the thumper. So yeah, it's big, no criticism, it's just a big idea of what these things look like.
So Paul and Jessica come across a Fremen seat, a Fremen encampment in the rocks. So they find man car steps and they go into the rocks and they just kind of walk up on it and all of the freemen are there, like as symboled waiting for them, eyes glowing blue. It's almost like they're standing at attention for their arrival. And here we meet Stilgar the leader of the Fremen group, and we're also going to meet Channi of the Yeah.
So, still Gar is played by Everett McGill born nineteen forty five, accomplished American character actor with a very signature look. His other credits include eighty one's Quest for Fire, eighty five Silver Bullet, The Stephen King, Werewolf Movie, eighty six's Heartbreak Ridge, nineteen eighty seven's Werewolf, eighty nine's Licensed to Kill, Twin Peaks nineteen ninety ones, The People Under the Stairs
under Siege two, and Lynches The Straight Story. Again, not really fair to compare this performance to Javier Bardam Stillgar in the new movies because he, again, like a lot of these characters, he had a lot more room to breathe, and there's a lot more space for that character to come alive.
Yeah, this is speed still Gar. Yeah, I guess we should go ahead and introduce Chawny as well. Yeah.
Channie is played by Sean Young born nineteen fifty nine, American actress who had previously appeared in nineteen eighty one Stripes and more importantly eighty two's Blade Runner as the replicant Rachel. Subsequent roles included eighty seven's No Way Out in Wall Street ninety one, Kiss Before Dying ninety four is Ace Venture a pet detective, and more recently Blade
Runner twenty forty nine. In another case, hard to compare this Channey to the recent film, where Zendeia does a great job playing a more complex and I think arguably stronger vision of this character. Chani is a strong character in this nineteen sixty five novel, but I think some of our strengths had to be updated for like a modern audience.
Well, also in the new movie, I think you could argue in some ways Part two is is you get a lot of the story from Channi's perspective, which makes a lot of sense. That's a good way to frame it, to see, like the way Paul changes. So I think that was a really strong choice. And like you said, Zendeia is great in the new one. I don't want to as is Harve or Barden. Also, they're both fantastic
in the new movie. I don't want to blame Sean Young and Everett McGill for the shortcomings of these characters in this version. I think it is not the fault of the actors. I think it is the fault of the script and the editing that like, these actors are just not given time to portray these characters in the movie. It's just just lightning speed editing from now on. So, like what happens when they arrive at the siege is that you know still Gar. He's like, oh, hi, I'm Stillgar.
You know I'm the leader of the Fremen group. The boy man will be taken into the tribe and then Lady Jessica like grabs him by the throat. Paul scrambles. He says, oh, she has the Weirding way. If you can do this to the strongest of us, you're worth ten times your weight in water. And then still Gar says, teach us the Weirding way, and you shall have sanctuary. And Jessica accepts, and Paul meets Johnny daughter Channi is
the daughter of Leat Kinds. She's a member of the Fremen tribe here and you know he has seen her before in dreams and premonitions, like a warrior of great bravery and great beauty. Kyle, of course, is smitten. Here they introduce to still Gar. You know it's all going to be You're welcomed by the people. Oh you need a new name. Your name will be Usel that is the pillar of strength. Oh but what else can be
your name? Your name will be wad deeb. Paul picks that because it's the name of the desert mouse, whose figure is seen on the second moon of the planet. And so they're brought into these subterranean caverns where the Fremen live. They discover that the Freemen have huge caches of water they are collecting from the atmosphere via wind traps, these vast pools in the dark. And this whole sequence where Jessica and Paul are welcomed into the Fremen world.
You know, the cast is doing the best they can. The sets are cool and stuff, but it is so rushed. The introductions are not given a chance to breathe. It's just like, hi, oh wow, you were really strong. Now you're one of us. Here are all our secrets. I love you. And it comes so fast.
Yeah, the new has a lot more time to work with this part of the story, with Paul and Jessica gradually changing from you know, endangered outsiders to tentative allies to the Fremen, valued members of a movement to members of its people, to leaders, and eventually, in Paul's case, to Messiah.
What is at least half the run time of this recent movie is like, I don't know five minutes in this metalle, Okay, let's check in on the Harconins because they're doing some really good stuff here. So we come into them on They're on Arakine, I think, and Vladimir Harconin is laughing crazily as he flies around a big machine in his levitation suit. Rabon, who is supposed to be running spice production on the planet, he walks up to.
This is what happens. There's like a dead cow hanging from the ceiling, and Rabon walks up to the dead cow, peels off part of its face starts eating the cow face raw. Then the baron tells Rabon to be harsh and brutal in ruling Aracus. And while he's saying this, he's like reaching his fingers into Rabond's mouth to like play with the chewed up cow face as he explains this, Yeah, I have no words. Then Rabond leaves then out comes Fade wearing like this wings of victory speedo. That's amazing.
Top all time Top five movie speedo, and the Baron reveals that after Rabon has become despised by the people of Doune, he's going to give the planet to Fade so that he can be loved by contrast.
Yep, yep, that's the whole plan. I mean, that's part of the plan. It is legitimately part of the plan. Rabond's gonna crush the planet, get the spice levels up, the spice production levels up. Everyone's gonna hate him, and then Fade's going to come in as the savior and will be at least to some degree beloved by the people, or as much as you can love a hard conean despot.
Yeah, and but the Baron's face boils just keep looking worse and worse. We also see here the captured Sufir hawat the mintat of House the Treads. They explained to him that he must milk a hairless cat that has a rat taped to it every day in order to acquire the antidote to a poison that the Hearks have given him.
Yeah. This is also unnecessary and so weird, especially the cat rat thing. It almost feels like Lynch is trolling us a little bit.
In the book.
This basic situation exists, but it's essentially just a poison anecdote con like, hey, loyal a tradees mintet, you have to work for us now, isn't that delightful? And if you don't, you're going to die because of this poison in your system. And they apparently filmed sequences of this plotline for Dune Part two and just had to cut it for time, which you know, is a shame, but I guess understandable given them all that's going on in the movie.
Yeah. So, back at the Sieeche of the Freemen, Lady Jessica is offered to Chants to become the reverend mother of the Seech, but to do so, she has to drink the poisonous water of life and survive. And this calls back to a prophecy about the Quisat's Hatterak that young Paul would drink the water of life and survive. Other men who have tried have died, but maybe Paul could survive it as well. But before that, Lady Jessica
has to drink it. She does, and this causes her later to give birth to When she gives birth to her daughter named Alia, Alia is like born with all the knowledge and power of a reverend mother and like matures very rapidly, so we've got like a super genius Benny jesser At baby and that's just that's just not what you want, abomination. She's scary as heck when we see her later in the in the finale, it's one of the creepiest things ever committed to film.
Yeah, yeah, she is super creepy. Herbert in general likes creepy super babies and super creepy super children. They pop up elsewhere in the Doom novels. Obviously, DV went in a slightly different direction with the way this is portrayed in the film, and again, interesting, I think it's interesting what they did. It'll be also interesting to see how this is incorporated into subsequent adaptations of especially done Messiah.
Yeah. Also here we see more of Paul and Chahnnie falling in love. But also we get Paul addressing the assembled Frimen fighters and he's like, hey, look, we got a common enemy, the Harconins. We've got to destroy him. My mom and I are going to teach you the weirding way. We've got to attack and destroy the spice trade.
So we see a lot of weirding way training sessions with the weirding module where they're saying like chuck sah and it you know, makes it shoot a little blast out that they say will paralyzed nerves, shatter bones, set fires, suffocate an enemy, or burst his organs, and they're just going to keep on attacking the Harconins until they have victory. This is also the my name is a killing word scene where he discovers that in the name wadd but will like make things break and shatter.
All right, we're getting the troops together. We're gonna we're gonna bring spice production to its knees and eventually take out the hearken it so okay.
Now we also get the worm taming scene here where Paul has to go learn to ride a worm because you can't be a true freemen unless you can ride a worm. And so we go. He goes out with his worm riding materials, the thumper, the hooks, which are a gift from the Siech, and the freemen are gathered on the sand dune looking on Stillgar has a very cold look, but Paul like he sets the thumber going. He does the Litany against fear. They realize he is
called a very big worm. And this is again along with the prophecies of what the freemen called the Lissan al Kayib, the you know, the voice from the outer world, the messiah figure they're waiting for. So we get some shots of Paul getting onto the worm, like using the hooks and ro over on the top. Not the best
looking shots in the movie. A couple of these do look kind of kind of cheap, But then when we see the worm by itself, it looks awesome and the flower petals open and we see the big mouth heavy dune theme playing on the soundtrack, as like Stilgar comes to climb the trailing rope behind Paul and join him on the worm. But Rob, I think we may have alluded to this earlier. There is a very funny soundtrack moment here where like the heavy horns of the dune
theme give way to rock and distorted guitars. And I enjoy this because it's funny, but I don't think it quite has the intended effect.
Yeah, yeah, it's a little a little goofy. In general, I have to reiterate love the Toto score. I have listened to it all the way through a couple of times since we recorded part one of This Weird House. But yeah, it's a little little comical here with the guitar.
Oh Man, that desert I mean, it's right on the edge, like that desert theme. It is pure velveta, Like it is so smooth and cheesy and rock yacht rock sounding, but it's also great and it fills me with feelings I can't deny it. Yeah, So a bunch of time passes, we see Paul and Stilgar leading frem and attacks on the Hearken and spice mining operations. You know, they're using the weirding modules to say boom and zap and make
things explode. And then of course Paul thinks he is going to be able to get his revenge because when the spice flow stops, that's going to summon the Baron and the Emperor to the planet because they're going to come there be forced to deal with us. Yeah. Of course, the Baron and the Emperor become aware of this figure called wad Deep that like there they're wounded fighters come back to them and they're muttering what Deep? What Deep? So like who is this guy? And you know they're like,
we've got to destroy him. We get some more voiceover from Virginia Madsen telling us that wad Deep and the Frimen pretty much completely shut down spice production and that Rabond is trying to hide this from his uncle but apparently not succeeding, and things are getting really dire so soon I think the Emperor is going to have to come. Oh but before that, we get Paul's reunion with Gurney Halleck with Patrick Stewart. They like run into each other.
I guess Garnie Halleck is now working for the Harconins or working maybe independently as like a spice harvester protector here in the desert, and Paul and Gurney run into one another and reunite. Of course, Gurney thought Paul was dead this whole time. By the way, there is maximum Toto all over the soundtrack in the background of this section, overdriven guitars wailing the whole thing, and eventually we see the circumstances they're going to drive us toward the terrible conclusion.
So back at the Imperial Palace, the space in Guild shows back up once again to harass the Emperor some more. No Guild Navigator. This time, it's only like the Holy Brotherhood of Hazmatt in their industrial religious looking robes. Once again, they speak a foreign language that is like automatically translated by this weird microphone and the language itself. I was listening to it. It sounds like kind of feral. So there's kind of grunts and snarling like a wild animal,
but also notes of igor in the monster mash. Yeah, and so they speak to him, and they the conversation that very much has the effect of wait, who's the emperor here? Because the Spacing Guild is really browbeating him. They're like, look, if you don't get the spice mining back under control immediately, you are going to live out the rest of your life in a pain amplifier. I don't know what a pain amplifier is, but I get the idea.
Yeah, I feel like they this is a moment where they kind of overplay the power of the Guild here because all tim I mean, the Guild is very powerful in the Dune universe, but so is the Benajestrit, so is House Carino. So everything is in kind of like a precarious balance of power. Yes, and here we're just kind of like, yeah, the Guild pushes everybody around, which is not really the flavor of the Guild and the actual source material.
I totally agree, but I also do like that the Emperor is not portrayed as just all powerful, that he has factions that he must appease. And you know, if, like if the lands Rod and the Space and Guild and people are turning against him, that is a threat to him. And it's not like he can just crush them all. That's true anyway. So the Emperor is going to take Sardikar to the planet Iracus. He's like, I know how we're going to deal with this complete destruction
of every life on the planet. We're just going to just destroy them all. Meanwhile, we get the sequence where Paul is finally going to fulfill the prophecy and drink the water of life. Of course, he tells Channi that he had a vision and he must do this. She doesn't like the idea, but he thinks he has no choice. He's got to do it. So Paul is led out
into the desert. Chany pledges her love to him, and they give him the water of Life to drink, and he has many more visions of like in a water dripping in a cavern and the mouth of a worm opening, and I like how the mouth of the worm is innercut with an extreme close up of a human eye, so like the worm's mouth is like the pupil within the iris. I thought that was pretty cool.
And here come the worm jets, because I think this is where we get the track that Eno collaborated on.
Oh interesting with the visions here, I think so, I think so. But worms gather from the desert around the Fremen to sort of keep a vigil beside Paul, and they don't attack. It's almost if the worms are showing reverence from what deep And eventually he is awakened in Chinese's arms with a new sense of determination and terrible purpose.
He's ready to be the messiah of the Fremen now and he stands before them in this great underground hall and gives a speech that is in some ways kind of powerful but unfortunately contains the sentence a storm is coming. Oh man, if writers just just skip over that one, you don't need the storm is coming, yeah, but his this kind of differences. He's like, you know, when it arrives, it will shake the universe. He swears vengeance against the
Emperor and chance long live the fighters. So the Fremen warriors stream out of their seech and prepare for war, and we also see the Emperor in his Sardikar arriving on Oracus from deep space with the help of the Guild highliners. And the final battle comes about. So the Fremen Mountain assault on Irakan, led by Paul Stilgar and Gurney Halleck. They will use the a treades house atomics as well as the power of the worm. So they deploy all these thumpers and some of what Stilgar calls
worm sign the likes of which God has never seen. Yeah, I don't know.
I'm not going to geek out on a bunch of din stuff.
Bet.
Yeah, I don't like that line, And I don't think of a Fremen would say it like quite like that.
I don't think so either. Yeah, that's a little uncharacteristic. But the worms are cool here. I like the way the worms are depicted is coming into the battle.
Oh yeah, I love the addition of having these kind of like static electrical discharges in the air around them.
Yeah, it looks really cool as the battle is going on. There's a confrontation between Baron Harkonen and the Emperor. The Emperor has killed Rabon and like stuck his head on a big spike, and then he's gathered people in his portable throne room. So they got Princess Erilan there, the Reverend mother, a bunch of Sardocar members of the Space and Guild. The Emperor gives the baron a very I'm
disappointed in you speech. But before the Baron can suffer a similar fate to Rabond, they are interrupted by the arrival of someone in black robes. It is a child. Uh oh, it's Paul's sister Alia, and she is instantly so so unsettlingly creepy with this horrible voice voiced by an adult. I think we actually see her talk her voice. I would describe it like putting on a shoe and then feeling something start moving under your toes.
Yeah, this kid is perfectly unsettling in a way very similar to the accidental unsettling character of the kid in a House by the Cemetery. Yeah, where Bob's voice was dubbed by an adult woman and he comes off in some sort of like a like a strange being, but it's intentional here and it absolutely works. This kid's creepy.
So Alia, the sort of reverend mother child, has a confrontation with the Emperor and with the Reverend mother guys Helen Moheim. She's like, I am a messenger from what deep, poor Emperor. I'm afraid my brother won't be very pleased with you. It's it's I can't really do it justice. It's so creepy, and the Reverend mother is like she's an abomination. But oh she also screams get out of my mind, exactly like David Bowie and The Man who
Fell to Earth. Oh yeah, anyway, So Paul and the freemen used the house atomics to blow up the mountains that are shielding the approach to our Keene, and they mount their assault. They bring lots of loose worms alongside them, and the freemen and their worms clash with the Emperor's sardikar. At some point, we see the Emperor personally controlling a
mounted gun to fire at the worms. Not sure about that choice, like he doesn't seem like much of a hands on warrior, but also also the Emperor tasks Baron Harkonen with destroying Alia. But of course Alia, I think she's going to get the better of this encounter. And she does. She Like, what exactly does she do to the baron?
She jabs him with the with the gomdjabar.
I believe, Oh yeah, okay.
And kills him like this is the death blow. She is Alia of the knife after all.
Oh okay. Yeah, we see her like she's so happy about it. She's dancing around with her eyes closed holding a knife, and we also see the baron he flies away as he is dying and then is chomped by a worm from the That's a bit much. That's a bit much, okay. So the final confrontation, you know, the freemen are victorious in the battle. They've taken the city.
They gather everybody, all of the power players in like the big room in the palace at Arikine, and Paul goes up to the emperor and his retinue and demonstrates his power. He intimidates the Emperor and silences the reverend mother with a powerful word. Also, she's like, ah, and she appears to have metal teeth.
Now, oh wow, maybe she has X and teeth.
I don't know, maybe, but so Paul is confronted by the remaining member of how Sarcona and the young Fade Rautha. They're going to have to face one another, of course, and Fade Rautha takes the Emperor's blade in his hand for the fight. This is going to be a knife fight to the death. There are things I really like about this fight. I like how there are people playing pyramid shaped drums.
Yeah, those are cool.
Sting keeps yelling I will kill you.
I love that line. This has always been one of my favorite cheesy lines from this film and just in from film in general.
We already talked about this difference, but I do like that this keeps Fade Rautha as a cheater. He's not the kind of honorable fighter in a way honorable fighter that they make Fade Rotha in the new movie Fade Rotha here tries to cheat with a poisoned barb, but Paul gets arounded by saying, I will bend like a reed in the wind. And he sort of like bends and lets Fade come around him and then stabs him in a very very strange way.
Yeah, this is this is a quality kill, and this is I think this falls in line with what you were talking about in the first episode we did about the Lynchian approach to portrayals of death, because he drives his knife up through a Fade's chin into his brain, and then after Fade has fallen dead under the floor, he uses the weirding voice to shatter the stone floor beneath him, a moment that really feels to reson like it resonates with a kind of biblical power. You know.
It's a moment that I think really legitimately rules in this film and cements the ascendant might of paul A Triades.
I agree. I think it's very cool. They also say, you know, Usul no longer needs a weirding module. He can just like speak a word without the module and make things shatter. And from here we just sort of get a rather quick wrap up. Like the Princess, Irelan narrates that MAUDIEB had become the hand of God fulfilling the frim and prophecy. Where there was war MODEEP would now bring peace where there was hatred MADEEP would bring love, et cetera. Uh Yeah, yeah, is that what the story is?
I don't think so, not so much. Yeah, So in the end, yeah, we get this very heroic kind of conclusion, and in fact it goes beyond heroic and becomes like transcendent, almost religious, where Paul literally causes a miracle.
Yes, Paul makes it rain on Racus. It's in a way, I have to be fair. It is a great visual capper for the film, but it is one that makes zero sense within the context of the film and has no footing in the novel. Because Paul not control the weather and greening efforts on Aracus, which have been alluded to and are part of the world of Dune. These are going to be gradual, These are going to be focused on particular parts of the planet. So this moment is all feels and no sense.
Yeah. Yeah, So it's a very different kind of ending than we get from Dune Part two, the New one, which does go a longer way to try to to show Paul's change and change not for the better, his arc toward tyranny and his coldness, especially the most painful thing being at the end of the movie, the way he rejects Shawni for his you know, political alliance with House Corono by saying he's going to marry Princess Erolan. In the new movie.
Yeah, yeah, the movie does a great job of playing up the fact that this is leading into a massive holy war, Interstellar Holy war. It is not going to be peace and love across the universe. It is going to be pretty grim days ahead, and it is because as Paul has risen to such power.
On the other hand, if you're just trying to make a standalone film, the Lynch movie has a much more feel good ending. Yeah. I don't know if that's something. I don't know if that's good. It's not really what the story is, but it doesn't feel as sad as the ending of the new one.
Yeah. Yeah, the new film has a grimness and a sadness to it. My son watched the has only seen these the new adaptations, and he when I was asking him about how he felt about the movies, he was like, Oh, it's it's really cool, but it's kind of joyless. And then that is true. I mean, the film is not
a joyful experience, especially as it wraps up. And I would say that Dune in general is a very joyful thing, and certainly in my own life, but a lot of that is in the details of everything in the world building and the ecology and the philosophy and the use of religion and history. It's like the sum of the whole is joy, but the actual events that occur in the film here, especially towards the end, are not.
I feel like there's so much more I could say, but we've gone on way too long already, so I think we must wrap it up.
Yeah, if there's any unfinished business and we can discuss it in future listener mail installments, that'll be a good place for that. And likewise, Yeah, if you have thoughts on the new Dune adaptations, the nineteen eighty four's Dune that we've been discussing in this episode, your history with the film, any of the merch any of that weird
merchandise they put out, like those strange action figures. Are these legitimately cool revel model kits that I don't think anybody bought initially, but now go for you know, one hundreds of dollars online right in We would love to hear from you. We'll even hear thoughts about those. The mini series, the sci fi mini series, which again has
a great cast, but some CGI that is really not aged. Well, just a reminder to everybody that's stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursday, short form episode on Wednesdays. On Mondays we do listener mail, and on Fridays we just set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird movie on Weird House Cinema. If you want a complete list of all the movies we've covered so far, and sometimes a peek ahead of the future, go to
letterbox dot com. It's l E T T E r boxd dot com. We are Weird House on there and we've got a list for you to look at.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Jjpousway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future, or just to say hi, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.